


Soul Deep

by icewhisper



Category: Shadowhunters (TV), The Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: M/M, Multi, Other, non-permanent death, post-season one, some Book spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-23
Updated: 2016-12-29
Packaged: 2018-09-11 12:25:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8979637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icewhisper/pseuds/icewhisper
Summary: The bond between parabatai was something sacred. Magnus had understood that for more years than Alec had been alive, so when he promised they'd bring Jace home, he meant it. What they managed wasn't what anyone had hoped for, but some bonds can never be broken. Death was not the end.





	1. Magnus

**Author's Note:**

> Loosely inspired by drakamena/katikat's _Parabatai_ scribbledoodle you can read [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5178632/chapters/13982608).

In the end, they died together, hands clasped as they bled out on the dirty floor of a ship,  _ parabatai  _ runes burning in pain and grief that finally faded out to something that felt like peace. They hadn't been enough. No matter how hard they'd fought or how their friends and their family fought on the levels above them, they still lost.

They had tried to save Jace--bring him  _ home _ \--and they'd been pigheaded. Strategy lost out to human error and their underestimating the true size of Valentine's forces. They underestimated his strength, his willingness to stab the Mortal Sword into his son's chest when it was already wet with Alec's blood.

Jace was the one that reached for Alec's hand, his grip weak and his heart breaking. He thought Clary's name as he breathed Alec's and the weak grip he got back was the only reply his  _ parabatai _ could give while blood bubbled from his mouth. Punctured lungs, too full of blood. Bleeding. Drowning. No one was going to find them in time.

Jace thought he heard Alec try to choke something out, but it was too garbled to understand. Something in his gut told him it was his name or Magnus'. It didn't make him feel better.

* * *

Isabelle screamed when she found them.

Clary cried.

Magnus tried to heal them, his hands glowing blue as he repeated Alec's name like he was begging, but it was too late. Voice clogged and heartbroken, Clary pulled him away.

"They're gone," she told him, thin arms wrapped around him. He sagged against her chest, numb and sobbing, and watched as Izzy pulled Alec's body into her lap with one hand while the other buried itself in Jace's hair. She bent over them both, murmuring in Latin through the tears and experience told him the words he couldn't hear over the blood pounding in his head.  _ Ave atque vale. Hail and farewell _ .

 

"You're Magnus?" Max asked as he lifted his head off Isabelle's chest. He nodded in response and the little boy mirrored it, face serious under his tears. "Did you love Alec?"

"I did," he whispered as another lump formed in his throat. They hadn't had long enough, their time too short for them to ever broach the subject, but Magnus knew his heart and he knew the hold Alec had on him. He still had it.

"He loved you too," Isabelle told him later, hours after Max had fallen asleep in her lap and Clary had cried herself to sleep on the ottoman with Simon’s arms wrapped around her. "I know he did."

 

"He wasn't my brother," Clary said, broken and shaking, when she appeared on his doorstep in the middle of the night. "He wasn't... He thought... We never got to tell him."

He pulled her against him, whispering reassurances and empty promises that Jace knew; that Alec would have told him. He didn't think she took comfort in the hope. There was no way they'd ever know.

 

He wore white to the funeral, honoring the tradition even if he couldn't wear the runes. People stared, watched him and the way Clary clung to his hand and the way Isabelle wrapped herself against his side. He met Robert's eyes with sadness and saw the man  _ finally _ understand what him and Alec had had. Maryse glared and he couldn't find it in him to regret the harshness when he said, "He died knowing I cared, but he died thinking you hated him." Harsh. Cruel. He didn't get any satisfaction from the way her face broke, but he held onto the memories of the pain she'd caused Alec.

He couldn’t forgive her for that.

 

Isabelle pressed the bow and quiver into his hands with a shaky breath. "He said they were yours," she told him. "That if anything happened to him..." Her breath hitched and she flattened a hand over her chest like it would stop the pain. It didn't. He knew it wouldn't. "He wanted you to have them."

Alec had been prepared, had his wishes known for if and when he died.

He'd been twenty years old.

The thought kept Magnus up that night, gold eyes staring at the wall while he held the bow and quiver to his chest.

 

He had exactly one picture of Alec and himself, a quick shot on his phone that he’d insisted on when they’d finally made it out for their first date. The lighting was horrible and his hand had shook just a little too much when he stretched his arm out, but Alec was smiling in it, eyes lit up as Magnus pressed a kiss to his cheek. Happy. Free.

He hung the picture on his wall beside a picture Isabelle had given him of Alec and Jace. That one was clearer, both boys smiling and with Jace's arm slung over Alec's shoulders. He kept them together in his own sign of respect, because even if he hadn't particularly liked Jace much, he understood the bond between  _ parabatai _ .

Those pictures stayed on his wall over the years, hanging beside an old photograph of Ragnor and eventually joined by others. It became a shrine, he realized one day as he hung Raphael’s picture up beside the one of a too-young Max Lightwood. Somewhere along the line, it became a shrine to those he’d lost.

He didn’t relish the thought of how big the shrine would become.

 

Valentine died by Isabelle’s hand and Magnus couldn’t find it in him to be surprised. She’d mentioned it once after Alec and Jace’s funeral, a whisper in the dark as they drowned their sorrows, but she’d sworn it when Max died.

She got what she wanted, her whip curled around Valentine’s neck as she drove her blade into his chest. He hadn’t been there, but they’d found the bodies. Found Valentine pierced and strangled and Isabelle beside him, her face streaked so much in tears that Magnus knew she’d been letting herself mourn her brothers when the demon came up behind her.

She hadn’t had time to react.

He hung her picture on the wall and felt like he’d broken a promise to keep her safe.

 

He closed himself away after the war, hidden away to mourn and try to heal. The mourning, he did. Healing was another matter and one that he was pretty sure he failed in. He still woke up some nights, breathing Alec’s name.

On the easiest nights, he cried himself back to sleep.

On the worst, he cursed Ragnor’s memory for urging him to go after Alec. He cursed himself for going to the wedding. He cursed Alec for choosing him just to leave him too soon.

It was no one’s fault but Valentine’s. Logic reminded him every time the thoughts sprang up, but logic meant very little when he realized he was already forgetting the sound of Alec’s voice.

 

Clary never quite got over Jace. Her eyes held onto the same lingering sadness his did, hurting and without closure. She got his name across her collarbone in memoriam, a true tattoo mixed in with the runes that littered her body.

She didn’t flinch at the sting as the artist burned it into her skin, but she sobbed when she saw the finished product.

He held her hand and tried to coax a smile out of her. “Do you remember how bad he was at driving?”

She laughed through the tears.

 

“Do you think she still loved him?” Simon asked as they watched the funeral pyre burn Clary’s body to ash. Her family stood before the flames with straight backs, but Magnus could see the tears staining their cheeks. Her husband stood behind the children, sturdy hands on their shoulders as they said goodbye.

“Yes,” he said simply, his voice as hoarse as the vampire’s.

“Do you still love him?”

His breath hitched and he closed his eyes, remembering smiles and the touch of an archer’s calloused hands. “Yes.”

Simon’s lips thinned, pained, and he looked back at the fire. “When does it stop hurting?” he asked, his voice soft. “When does losing them stop hurting?”

Ragnor. Alec. Jace. Max. Raphael. Isabelle. Jocelyn. Luke. Clary.

He shook his head once, feeling every single year he’d been alive weighing down on him. “It doesn’t.”

TBC


	2. Jace & Alec

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They died as they lived; together. Then, they lived after death.

Alec died first, blood bubbling from his mouth and more spilling from the wound in his chest. Bleeding into his lungs. Choking. Drowning. His head lolled to the side, watery eyes finding Jace and more blood and _this wasn’t supposed to happen_ . He was supposed to be the strategist--the _leader_ \--and he’d promised Clary they’d bring Jace home. He’d promised her and Izzy.

He’d promised _Max_ and, now, both of them would go home in body bags. They’d be destined for nothing more than funeral pyres and ashes for the Silent Brothers to take away. Over. Finished. _Dead_.

“I’m sorry,” Jace choked out, his fingers tangled in Alec’s.

Alec opened his mouth, promises that it wasn’t Jace’s fault at all, that it was _his_ . If Valentine hadn’t got the best of him, Jace wouldn’t have been distracted, wouldn’t have turned his blade on the man just to have it cut into his own chest. Everything he wanted to say--every reassurance--was right there, but he couldn’t find the air to vocalize them. He tried to smile, comforting despite the bloody lips, and shook his head slowly. _It’s not your fault. It’s okay._

“They’re not going to find us in time.”

Alec knew. He nodded that time and squeezed Jace’s hand with the last bit of strength he had.

He closed his eyes and didn’t open them again.

 

Jace woke up to white and gold and the star-shaped scar on his shoulder _burning_. He grabbed at it, jaw clenched and head turning as he tried to figure out where he was. Not Valentine’s base. Not the ship. Not the Institute.

The memories hit him a second later. He panicked, springing up in a bed that wasn’t his and wearing loose clothes that weren’t his. Alec lay next to him, he realized with a sigh, and he reached out to touch his _parabatai’s_ neck. A steady thrum under his fingers like a promise of life that he knew had been gone before he followed the other boy into death. Blood slick fingers had searched for a pulse as he sobbed out apologies, but there was a pulse now, strong and steady.

It should have calmed him, but he gasped out Alec’s name like he had on that ship when he’d felt Alec die. Felt his life leave him and the pain coursing through their bond. He’d squeezed Alec’s hand hard enough that he was sure bones cracked and died with a sob.

The shock had been too much. Losing Alec… Even if the stab wound in his chest hadn’t been enough to do it, that would have. It had been too much for his body to handle, too much of a strain on a heart that was pumping blood out of his body instead of around it.

Dead. Broken. Their bond…

He pushed Alec’s shirt up with a jerk fast enough that it shocked him awake. Awake. _Alive_ . Their _parabatai_ rune still stood out on Alec’s skin, dark and active with the thin scar of the tracking one above it.

“Where are we?” Alec asked, his voice rough.

Jace didn’t answer, didn’t think he would have been able to even if he’d known the answer. He bowed forward, body twisted as his forehead touched Alec’s shoulder, and he cried.

 

Gabriel met them and Alec thought he might die again, thought he and Jace may simply burn up to dust as the angel lay wise eyes on them. He spoke to them slowly, voice loud in their heads, and it was so much like the Silent Brothers and so different that it made Alec’s head spin.

He clung to Jace’s hand as Jace clung to his and listened. Learned. The angel blood coursing through Jace. The mark on his shoulder. The strength and the pull of their bond. Jace’s blood pulled at Alec like a magnet, attracted by the part of his soul Alec owned, and how it warped and twisted until there was no telling where one soul ended and the other began.

Alec watched Jace touch his two-toned eye as the angel explained what no one else had ever been able to; _why_. Why Jace’s eye color had changed in the months seemingly out of nowhere. Why they were there. Not shadowhunters anymore, simply shadows, left behind to watch like ghosts. They shouldn’t exist. Even to the angels, they were as much an abomination as they were a curiosity. A bond that couldn’t be broken, even in death.

They said eternity and Alec began to laugh, hysterical over the irony of immortality when quiet conversations about it with Magnus had almost ended them before they started. Magnus had offered him a choice Alec had turned down, but realizing he’d never had a choice in the first place…

Jace apologized, whispered the words over and over as he tried to calm down the laughing that turned into sobs.

It wasn’t Jace’s fault, but Alec hadn’t been able to make the words form in his throat to tell him.

 

Alec told him the truth about Clary one night as they lay together, fingers tangled and staring at the ceiling. Quiet confessions of what they’d found and _it’s okay to love her_ that pushed Jace into tears. He could love her as much as he wanted, but he’d never get to hold her again. He’d never get to _tell her_.

Alec pulled him against his chest and let him cry himself to sleep without a word.

 

“Did you love Magnus?” Jace asked quietly the next morning.

Alec didn’t answer for a long time, one leg pulled up to his chest as he sat in the big window. He stared out at the scenery, but it was Magnus’ face he saw flitting across his vision. Smiles and gold cat eyes and the flourish that was purely _Magnus_. His heart twisted in his chest, painful, and he let out a shaky breath.

“Yes,” he whispered finally and closed his eyes when Jace wrapped his arms around him. He leaned into the touch and wished he’d had the time to tell him.

 

They barely spoke the first year, sad and drifting through the place that was somewhere between heaven and purgatory. Blood too pure for the half-hell of limbo, but too alive to touch an afterlife Jace had never believed in in life.

They stayed close, like their souls-- _soul_ , Jace reminded himself with a guilty pang--couldn’t stand to be apart. Their hands brushed as they walked most days, drawn to each other like moths to a flame. They slept in the same bed they’d woken up in, moving around in a daze that felt like they were mourning loved ones that were still alive, even if the tears had dried up.

 

Max died and their world fell apart all over again.

Jace screamed, fists punching walls that didn’t break.

Alec realized there were still tears left to cry.

 

Raphael died and Alec murmured a prayer for a religion he never followed, because Raphael had. He remembered that cross the vampire wore when he and Magnus would disappear for a day to visit family that didn't understand what Raphael was. He remembered the burn it would leave on his chest.

He whispered an apology to Magnus for another friend lost.

 

The relief of Valentine’s death was covered up by the grief of Izzy’s.

They both cried that day, hidden away in their room and sobbing into each other’s shoulders. The pride was buried, that she had the strength to overpower Valentine at all, and they knew she’d done it for them. Knew it in their guts as they wondered if everything was their fault.

The fact that Max wasn’t alone anymore only helped a little.

 

Clary got married and when the first child was born, Jace sought out the first angel he could find. “Is this going to happen to her too? The angel blood…”

No. It wouldn’t. Her soul was her own in the way Jace’s wasn’t. She wasn’t tied to anyone, free to move on to a higher plain when the time came. His soul and Alec’s was a complication, bound too tightly together to ascend any farther than they already had.

“Does it help?” Alec asked when Jace told him later.

Jace bit his lip, arms crossed as he leaned out over the marble balcony. “I don’t know yet.”

 

When Jace kissed him the first time, neither of them knew how long they’d been there. Hands cupping Alec’s face and bringing him down into something Alec used to dream about when they’d still been alive.

Alec kissed back, but he was the one that whispered a quiet _why_ when it broke.

“Because it’s you,” Jace murmured, his voice just as soft.

Jace still loved Clary and Alec knew he still loved Magnus, but he’d loved Magnus while loving Jace too. He always had, had never quite been able to let go of the feelings.

Alec kissed him the second time and they stumbled back towards the bed, sure they were committing some kind of cardinal sin in a holy place. No angel burst in to stop them or eject them to hell, though, and as Alec pressed himself up against Jace’s back, he realized he didn’t care. Let them do their worst. He and Jace had damned themselves a long time ago.

 

Clary died and Alec let Jace lose himself in him like it would stop the pain. Legs wrapped around Jace’s waist and his face in Jace’s neck, he held him tight.

“It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay. You’re not alone,” he promised as his head dropped back into the pillows. “I love you.”

Jace curled into his side after, cheeks damp and fingers tracing the bruises blossoming on Alec’s hips. “I love you too,” he choked out.

Alec kissed his hair and let him cry.

 

“Do you still love him?” Jace asked one night as they lay naked in their bed, chin propped on Alec’s chest.

“As much as you still love Clary.”

Jace hummed, understanding, and Alec felt the guilty coil in him loosen. He loved two people, but so did Jace. He wasn’t the only selfish one.

“Do you think he remembers me?” he asked later, sure that Jace was asleep and wouldn’t hear him at all.

He was awake, though, and he chuckled like Alec had just asked why the sky was blue. “Who the hell could forget you?”

 

A new war came as demons began to slip through in bigger hoards and the angels offered them a choice.

They said yes.

TBC


	3. Together

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two had become one. One became two. Two and two came together to make three.

The world wasn’t the one they’d left. A century had changed it, warping the shapes of the buildings and clogging the air. Alec coughed, his arm crossed over his face as he realized how clean the air was wherever they’d been. Jace clutched at the seraph blade, careful eyes taking in everything around them.

Jace started moving, trusting Alec to follow, but Alec pulled him back. He traced the glamour rune on Jace’s side, hissing out a reminder before he drew the same on on himself.

“Just because we can’t die doesn’t mean we don’t need to be careful,” Alec muttered to him. “We need to stay hidden. The shadowhunters-”

“-can’t know about us,” Jace finished, rolling his eyes. “I _know_. I was there too.”

“Where are you going?”

“Magnus’,” Jace said as Alec went stiff. “You need your bow back.”

 

“He’s going to think he’s gone insane, Jace. I can get a new bow.”

Jace stopped long enough to kiss him, tell him to shut up, and kept walking.

 

Magnus’ wards flared up when his door opened and he shot out with his magic, slamming the intruders against the wall. He should add spikes to it, he thought. Kill the demons right there, but demon blood ruined the finish on his hardwood floors.

The blond with Jace’s face laughed, shifting against the force holding him down like he thought it was funny. The brunet--because it wasn’t Alec, not his Alexander and it never would be again--cast an irritated look at his partner.

“I told you he was going to do this,” the brunet grumbled before he looked back at him. He looked so much like him, like that picture on his wall he kept restoring every time it began to yellow. The clothes were modern, but the hair was a century old, messy and tousled like it always was when Alec rolled out of bed and went right out into the field. His heart clenched. It still hurt.

Alexander’s memory would never stop hurting him.

“So prove it’s _us_ ,” the blond huffed, but he still had an air of amusement that Magnus wanted to peel off his face. Alec’s _parabatai_ had never been someone he’d been particularly fond of, but he’d been precious to Alec and to Isabelle, Max, and Clary. They’d loved him and seeing something walking around with his face and copying his arrogance…

“How?” the brunet scoffed, but at least he look appropriately unnerved. “It’s been a hundred years, Jace. I doubt he remembers telling me he’d do me pro bono.”

The blond laughed, knocking his head back against the wall. “You’re _kidding me_.”

Magnus went stiff, though. He remembered. He remembered every part of Alexander. Their little moments and that horrible torn sweater he’d wear around the loft when he’d curl up with a book to research. It was folded carefully in the back of his closet, preserved even though it had stopped smelling of him months after he died. “Say that again.”

The brunet’s eyes moved back towards him, searching, but there was an embarrassed flush on his cheeks. “When I asked you to be Izzy’s advocate,” he mumbled, “you said you’d do it for the right price and… You were _joking_.”

Not-Jace laughed harder. “Oh, this just gets better and better.”

“Shut _up_.”

“What did I tell you emotions were?” Magnus asked, eyes narrowed. He pushed the hope down. It wasn’t the first time a demon had shown up wearing Alexander’s face. This wasn’t him. It wasn’t. It never was.

“They were more like symptoms,” the brunet replied easily. “I don’t remember the whole speech you gave. You were kind of distracting.”

“You wanted to jump him, didn’t you?”

“ _Jace_.”

Magnus swallowed around the lump in his throat. “The last thing I told you?”

The brunet’s eyes went sad. “That we’d bring Jace home.” He shook his head as much as he could under the force holding him down. “I promised I’d be careful and I wasn’t.”

_“Be careful,” he murmured as he pulled Alec down into a kiss. “Promise me.”_

_Alec smiled, body wound tight in anticipation for the battle, but his hand circled around Magnus’ wrist. He smiled. “I promise.”_

“You lied,” Magnus said as his resolve began to crumble.

“Valentine was better than I was,” he corrected softly, guiltily. “I’m _sorry_.”

Magnus clenched his jaw and looked at the blond. “What did you do to Luke’s car?”

“Crashed it. I don’t do mundane driving.”

“It’s us, Magnus,” the other one said. “We can explain.”

“Your bodies _burned_ ,” Magnus hissed as cat eyes narrowed. “I watched it.” Burned together in one pyre, the smell harsh in his nose as their bodies were reduced to a single pile of ash. Together. The Silent Brothers had taken the remains as Jem gave him a solemn nod like he was offering his condolences.

“You were there?” the brunet whispered, eyes wide and hurting.

“Of course I was there,” Magnus snapped.

“You loved him,” the blond said, “you still do.”

The brunet whispered something, stumbling over the words of a language that wasn’t his, and Magnus _broke_. Indonesian. The one little phrase he’d ever taught Alexander.

 _Aku akan selalu pulang ke rumah_.

_I will always come home._

 

Alec grabbed Magnus as the spell released and the warlock crumbled to his knees. Held him tight against his chest and just _cried_. Jace stood behind him, a hand firm on his shoulder before he stepped away to give them their space. One man he loved letting him cry with the other.

Magnus smelled different, he thought as he pressed his lips to red-streaked hair. Different soap. Different shampoo. The angel wing ear cuff he’d given him a month before he died was the same, though. He still had it, Alec thought as he held him tighter.

He still had it.

 

Jace was the one that explained everything, detailing the complications of a _parabatai_ bond when he had so much angel blood in him. Their in-between place they’d woken up in. “We can’t die,” he said and it was like he could _see_ Magnus’ heart drop into his stomach. “Our souls are tied too close together. They can’t separate to move on.”

“You’re immortal.”

“More than you,” he confirmed. “We’ll just keep coming back. You won’t.”

Somehow, he doubted that made Magnus feel any better.

 

“I love you,” Alec told him later when Jace had disappeared into the shower.

“I love you, too.” Magnus kissed him and Alec could see the regret, could taste it in the kiss. Everything they hadn’t had time to say before. Everything they still had to say. Everything he still had to tell him.

He thought of Jace in the other room and guilt churned his stomach. He had to tell him, had to tell him what had happened between them over the last decades.

He pulled away from the kiss with a sigh, fingertips stroking Magnus’ cheek. “I love him too,” he murmured, like saying it any louder would hurt Magnus more.

“You always loved him,” Magnus said, though, and he didn’t look surprised. He looked accepting, like he’d dealt with the fact that two people had had Alec’s heart a long time ago.

“He loves me too. We…”

“It was a century, Alexander,” Magnus told him gently and, by the angel, he could see the flicker of hurt in Magnus’ eyes. “You’re allowed to love more than one person.” He swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing. “It’s okay.”

 

The shadowhunters didn’t find out about them, but Alec lingered by the Institute now and again, watching as Lydia’s descendents led what had been left to them when his parents died and the Lightwood name became another extinct line.

Jace got Clary’s name inscribed in ink on his chest after Magnus told him what she’d done. It brought him peace and when he sat down with Simon, he was able to talk about her and smile for the first time in a century.

“I loved Izzy, you know,” Simon told him one day as they sat in a dark bar. “We were… I would have saved her if I could.”

Jace knew. He’d gathered as much from the stories Magnus had told them and from the pictures he’d seen. “As long as you made her happy,” he said and tossed back another shot of whiskey. “She deserved that.”

“She deserved everything.”

He clasped Simon’s shoulder, tight, and nodded. They were barely friends, but Simon had made his little sister happy. It meant something.

 

They shared Alec for the first fifty years as he drifted between two bedrooms and two men. No schedules. No set rules other than a promise that they’d be honest if someone wasn’t happy. Mostly, it worked. Alec and Jace tracked in bloody boot prints every other day that ruined Magnus’ precious hardwood, but they came _home_.

Magnus wasn’t sure when he started to feel relieved each time he saw Jace trudge in with Alec, but the blond became a fixture in his life with his stupid haircut and his lack of thinking things through. He started to value him for more than the way he could make Alec smile.

He stopped being jealous.

He sat with Jace the night Alec dragged him home, bloody and _dead_ , and told him he’ll wake up. The angels said they’d keep coming back. “He won’t stay dead,” Alec told him as Magnus shuffled him off to the shower. “I don’t want him to wake up alone.”

“He won’t,” he promised. “I’ll be right there. Go clean up.”

Jace came alive with a gasp, chest heaving, and Magnus took his hand. Jace clung to it like a lifeline, grounding himself as the panic calmed and he relaxed. He didn’t let go, squeezing back just as hard as he murmured reassurances to Jace.

_It’s okay._

_You’re safe._

_You’re home._

“Alec…”

“He’s fine. He’s in the shower.”

Jace was asleep by the time Alec got out of the shower, hand still clasped in Magnus’. Alec smiled and settled down, shoulder to shoulder with Magnus as his hand carded through bloody blond hair.

They didn’t move the rest of the night.

 

“You like him,” Alec said one day as Magnus picked up the jacket Jace had left lying on the floor _again_.

“I tolerate him.”

Alec hummed. “Well, he tolerates you too. If that helps.”

 

There was something maddening about Magnus, a constant pull that Jace understood as much as he didn't. Alec loved him--loved both of them--but there was something Jace hadn't felt for him the first time around. Back then, his mind had been full of Clary and Alec and Valentine. He hadn't had time to think about men the way he thought about Alec now. He hadn't thought twice about Magnus.

He looked now, glanced over and watched the way Magnus’ touch made Alec shake. At first, he called it jealousy. He'd been jealous years ago too, hated the way Magnus pulled Alec’s devotion away from him. Pulled his love. He'd been petty back then, too stubborn to think Alec had room in his heart for both of them.

Learned differently when his love for Alec changed and began to share space with Clary.

He still loved her, still felt a pang deep in his chest when he remembered her smiles and the things they didn't get to do together. The time they hadn't gotten. The time they'd lost while they believed a lie. She'd gotten to live her life, though, and he loved her enough to be happy for her, even thanked the man that had loved her while half her heart was with someone that wasn't there anymore.

He made his peace with it as the years went on, enough that his happiness at her memory outweighed the pain.

Reminded himself he wasn't alone, even if he had to share.

“Figured you'd be with Magnus tonight.” They'd been all over each other earlier, pressed in close with Magnus perched up on the counter like a damn cat as they kissed. Moments like that usually ended with Alec in Magnus’ room for the night.

Alec hummed and turned the page on the book he was reading. “He had plans with Catarina.”

“So I'm the consolation prize?” he joked as he plucked the book from Alec’s hands and set it aside. He rolled over and propped his chin on Alec’s chest. “I'm hurt.”

Alec rolled his eyes. “You'll survive.”

“Doubt it.” He shrugged a shoulder. “When’s he getting back?”

“Knowing him? Sometime after the sun rises,” Alec chuckled, fingers lost in Jace’s hair. “Don't tell me you miss him already.”

“Like a hangover,” Jace deadpanned.

“You like him.”

The words struck something in him, implications flying, but Alec sounded too amused for the way Jace’s mind took them. “He's alright,” Jace said as his heart pounded in his head and something coiled up in his gut.

Alec hummed again. “Give me back my book.”

 

As a rule, Alec didn’t dance. He moved his hips just fine in the bedroom, but he was hopeless once music started. Magnus had never been able to teach him and gave up if only to save his toes from being crushed. Jace commended him for trying at all, but told him it was better to let Alec just spend the night with a book and that stupid sweater Izzy had tried to burn a thousand times.

Jace was the one that danced with him when they went to the clubs, runes glamoured for security and flirty smiles that came out after a couple of drinks.

Magnus smiled back.

Jace pressed in closer, hips touching hips, and ruffled the hair Magnus had spent an hour trying to perfect. “Yellow’s too bright. Makes you look like a bee.”

Magnus snorted, hands low on Jace’s hips. “Duly noted. Now, stop messing with it.”

“It looks better like this.”

“Messy?”

“Look at Alec. Messy works.”

Magnus rolled his eyes, but there was a fond smile tugging at his lips as he thought about the one they’d left at home. “Whose room is he sleeping in tonight?”

“Probably the chair,” Jace chuckled. “You know he’s gonna be passed out in it by the time we get back.”

Magnus chuckled as Jace brought his hands down to cup the back of Magnus’ neck, hips moving with the beat of the music. He was annoyingly beautiful, sweaty and skin dotted with some of Magnus’ own glitter. His hair had come loose from the gel he’d slathered it in and the lights above them lit it up in softer hues of pulsing blue. Stupidly beautiful, Magnus thought before he kissed him.

It was all teeth and lip biting and groaning into it like they both knew they’d been waiting the last decade to do this. Alec wouldn’t care, had told them forty years ago that it was fine if anything ever grew between them. Their little relationship wasn’t simply about him and he wanted them both happy, regardless of the combination it came in.

“Shit, yes,” Jace groaned as Magnus’ lips moved down to his neck.

“Home,” he muttered as he pulled Jace from the crowd and out of the club entirely, their hands locked as they made it to the alley. Jace kissed him again as he opened the portal, both of them falling through more than anything.

The noise shocked Alec awake on the chair before Magnus could grunt for Jace to wake him and he held his hand out in invitation.

He did.

They stumbled back to the master bedroom in a flurry of limbs and shedding clothes that didn’t stop until the barriers were gone and bodies were being pressed into the sheets.

Alec lay on his back, legs spread wide as Jace fucked him and Magnus stared at them before he pushed inside Jace. Watched him fall apart between them and wondered why they’d waited so long. They were too stubborn. He didn’t know how Alec put up with them.

“You like him,” Alec mumbled into his pillow later, already half asleep.

Magnus hummed at the same time Jace snorted out a laugh. “I tolerate him.”

“He’s alright.”

“You’re both ridiculous.”

The End

 


End file.
